


turn and face the sun

by BlackCats



Category: Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Introspection, Post-Future Past Verse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-10
Updated: 2016-04-10
Packaged: 2018-06-01 09:50:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6513331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackCats/pseuds/BlackCats
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the wake of Grima's demise, everything has changed. Morgan stands alone--at least, until he makes his choice.<br/>It's the right thing to do.<br/>(Morgan, the weight of the past, and the road back home.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	turn and face the sun

After everything, this book was still all he had left of his mother.

He gripped it to his chest like a lifeline, an anchor; it would keep him steady, but it had already proven that it would not stop him from drowning.

Such was the course of fate.

“You could come with me,” said his other self—the “Morgan” of a world both like and unlike his own. He turned now to regard her, taking in the strained attempt at a smile on her face, the dark rings beneath her eyes. Did he look even _half_ as exhausted? He felt like the answer was _more_.

“…Sorry, I can’t do that. I think here is where we part ways. It’s…”

There was a silence between them that they both understood.

“It’s been an adventure,” he finished with a light laugh, and she smirked.

“That’s _one_ way to put it.” She placed a hand on the neck of her wyvern, tossing a look over her shoulder with quirked brows. “Try not to get skewered on your way in. Those Ylisstol guards can really put up a doozy of a fight, if you recall.”

Morgan nodded. “Yeeeah…but, well, I come in peace this time. I’m willing to accept whatever punishment I receive. It’s only fair.”

“…Yeah,” she echoed, moving to climb onto her mount. He interrupted her, stepping forward to touch her shoulder with his fingertips.

“B-But what about you? Where will you go?”

“Pfft. ‘Where will I go’. I know _exactly_ where I’m going.” Her play at bravado fell flat. There was an uncertainty in her eyes that had always been there, even when Grima had twined its way through their hearts; reflecting father, mother, and a lineage of black blood. One only had to know where to look.

Her father had known.

“And that would be…?”

She stroked her chin, placing one hand instinctively on the bag containing her own book of tactics. “I think I’ll go to the Outrealms? I…well, let’s face it, there’s no helping the world I came from. Before Master Grima—“ she gulped, “—before Grima. Before Grima brought me here to your world, my home was smoked. Gone. Like…a candle blown out.”

He watched her climb into the seat of her wyvern, and he wondered what it must have been like to have Cherche as a mother.

“But who knows? Maybe the gatekeeper can help me out after all. If not, there’s worse fates to befall a girl than exile to a beach resort. I think I’ll find someplace…nice.”

Morgan nodded, and they held one another’s gazes for a time.

“It was nice having a twin brother,” she remarked airily.

“Agreed! Well, I mean, it was nice having a twin _sister_. I just wish it could’ve been under better circumstances.”

“Right? Tell me about it.” She gathered the reins up with the ease of someone who had done so many times before. As her wyvern shook dirt and dust off of itself and rose to its feet, she tried one more time. “Are you sure about this? We could just take off! Go somewhere where no one knows our names, and start all over. I can _promise_ we won’t be alone then.”

Chuckling wryly, he shook his head. “I’m afraid not! I have to do this, sister. It’s the only way I can even _try_ to set things right.”

“Huh. I’m somehow not surprised. Suit yourself!” With a crack of leather, her wyvern was soon churning the air with its great wings as it lifted off, circling around once to gain altitude as its rider called out, “Good luck!”

He waved until he couldn’t see her silhouette—dark and proud and lonesome—against the blue skies of Ylisse, anymore.

And then he turned, and started down the road toward home.

He hadn’t dared to ask his “other self” to fly him any closer to Ylisstol than she already had. Though she had eagerly offered to airdrop him literally on the doorstep of the Exalt, they both knew that such a venture would be strategically unsound in the most fatal way possible. Grima was gone, but peace was a long way from being restored. Risen still roamed the countryside and frantic, splintered Grimleal forces fought with the desperation of cornered dogs against the emboldened Ylissean armies. Peace would come, but it would not be immediate, and the Exalt would be under heavier guard than ever.

At least, he should hope so. It only made sense. With the Grimleal on their last legs, a final, vengeful attempt made for Lucina’s life was all but inevitable.

That was all right. He would find a way to reach her. To keep her safe.

The sun was shining for the first time since his childhood, and Morgan turned to look at the fields of green rolling past him in gentle slopes. Already, the dying grass was rejuvenated, bringing color to places that had once been sparse and bare.

He remembered something.

_“Morgan,” began his mother, laughter warm and low in her voice. “What are you doing?”_

_“O-Oh, what? Huh? Uh…nothing!”_

_But little ever slipped past her shrewd gaze. She took in the speed with which he dusted off his hands, and she smiled, shaking her head._

_“Were you building a pitfall?”_

_“No, I was just…looking for buried treasure! You know, like Owain talked about, in his uh…’narrative’ yesterday!”_

_“Hmm, but if you’d been listening,” Robin replied, gently ruffling his hair, “Owain said the treasure was buried to the east. These are the western fields.”_

_“East and west are subjective! I…aw, okay, you got me.” He pouted. “I was hoping to really get you this time!”_

_“Another time, dear.”_

_He couldn’t help but grin when she kissed his forehead._

_“Pitfalls are dangerous around here, though. You might break somebody’s leg, or trip up a carriage. How about we fill it in, and then we’ll play a game together? Just you and me.”_

_“That sounds great! But…are you sure Father doesn’t need you right now?”_

_Robin knelt down next to his hastily covered and hastily dug hole, tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ears. “Your father will be just fine without me for a little while. He’s with your sister.”_

_“Is he showing her Exalt stuff again?”_

_“Exalt stuff,” she agreed, humming thoughtfully. “You know, pitfalls might not be such a bad idea for invading forces…hmm…”_

_“I’ve got some ideas for that!”_

_His mother smiled again. “Oh? I’m listening. Go ahead, Morgan.”_

It was funny how such a simple memory made his heart heavy with longing.

His wandering thoughts eventually found their way to the Robin from another world. She had been younger than the mother he knew, but there’d been no mistaking that wise, gentle demeanor she possessed. Seeing her face, hearing her words…it had been like a dream.

Or perhaps, it had _pierced_ the dream.

How had he ever allowed himself to look into Grima’s abyss, and to accept it into the part of him that had always known kindness? Not just for his mother…but for his father. Chrom was a good and noble man. It pained him to think that _this_ was what he had contributed to the Exalted Bloodline—a hundred battles’ worth of death and despair.

Maybe he could be like these fields.

Morgan ran his palm across a patch of renewed grass, sighing even as he smiled.

Sometime later, the rattling of a carriage echoed in his ears. Morgan turned to see a beaten old jalopy making its way toward him, drawn by two horses—one was sprightly and young, the other old and gray. It was so delightfully quaint that he laughed aloud.

(It was a good thing that he had buried his Grimleal robe deep within his bag.)

“Hey there, sonny! D’ya need a ride?” asked the coachman, and Morgan supposed he did.

From then on, travel was an even more pleasant affair. The coachman chattered at length about things that Morgan could scarcely comprehend; he spoke about TIki, Nah, and salvation, about the state of the realm and the crops, about the dawning of a new day over a world that had been choked in darkness for so very long. The Risen were being thinned out. The Grimleal were being exterminated with the same ruthless effectiveness they had once employed upon the weak and defenseless. And most of all, there was praise to be stacked upon the Exalt.

Princess Lucina. Exalt Lucina.

Still just his sister, to him.

_“Is there really no other way?”_

_“That’s all I’ve got,” he’d admitted, circling his finger in figure-eight patterns around the map. “If we go through here, we’ll be marching straight between two Grimleal outposts, and that’ll put us right in a pincer movement. Trying to skirt along the edge will stick us in the roughest Risen territory in the country…that’s the borderlands with Plegia.”_

_Lucina frowned. “So it’ll have to be the mountains.”_

_“Afraid so. It’ll be nearly a week’s worth of rough traveling in unpleasant conditions, but it’ll still be kinder than the alternatives. Even if we commandeered a vessel, it’d be just as dangerous. Plegia’s navy is nothing to sneeze at! We’ve got intelligence telling us all about how they’ve been sinking ships trying to flee Ylisse…”_

_Sighing, Morgan slumped back in the rickety old chair in the command tent, thumbing the edges of a page in his book._

_“Sorry. If I was anywhere near as good as Mother, you’d not have to worry so much…”_

_“That’s not true.” Lucina placed a steadying hand on his shoulder, smiling down at him. “Ever since this war began, you’ve been invaluable. You’ve seen us safely through more conflicts than I can readily recall. We’ll make this work.”_

_Following her gaze to the map, Morgan nodded._

It’d work. In a manner of speaking, anyway.

Ylisstol was still heavily barricaded, and Morgan pondered the irony as the carriage was easily admitted into the capital without so much as a single bag check. An obvious air of jubilation suffused the streets as doors and windows were thrown open wide for the first time in a decade. So simple.

To think that he’d spent the last few years trying to puncture the heart of the halidom in Grima’s name.

“Thanks fer keepin’ an old man company. We only saw _one_ o’ them ‘Risers’ on the way ‘ere! Talk about an improvement, eh? Take a bit o’ coin fer yer trouble—no, no, I insist! I hope ya can find good work. There’s plenty o’ rebuildin’ efforts goin’ on, and I’m sure they could benefit from the help of a smart lad like yerself.”

Bidding farewell to the coachman, Morgan wandered the marketplace, indeed pausing here and there to help bereaved wives set up stalls where they could sell their freshly-grown produce.

“I lost Mac four long years ago,” lamented a baker, her eyes creased with old laugh-lines even as her forehead was marred with furrows brought in by stress. “But I know he wouldn’t want me to give up on our business. We’d wanted this ever since we were children…we talked about giving free cookies out to the kids every Sunday morning, after service. I’ll be able to do that again soon…I think that’s what he’d like.”

Morgan nodded as he pulled some tarp into place, covering a hole in the wall that was scheduled to be fixed by local brick-layers the next day. “From what you told me about him, I’m sure you’re right.”

“You’re a sweet child…you remind me a bit of my Thomas. What did you say your name was again…?”

“Er—M-Morgan.”

If his name held any connotation, she didn’t show it. The baker gathered up a bag of flour and simply replied with, “I could always do with another pair of hands. Let me know if you’d like a steady job and a roof over your head—I can offer you that much. Tiki watch over you, Morgan.”

As he left, Morgan found himself wondering if Tiki or Naga or any of the Divine Dragons were watching him right now.

Or if they’d ever been watching over him before.

_“Morgan!”_

_Lucina’s frantic cry was met with a sad smile._

_“You go on ahead! I’ll hold them back!”_

_The mountain route had been a mistake._

_“I won’t leave you to them!”_

_He saw her move, Falchion shining in her hand, but he fired a bolt of Thunder over her head and made her reel back._

_“What are you—?!”_

_“The people don’t need a clueless tactician. They need an Exalt to lead them, to give them hope—and only_ you _can do that!”_

_Facing the writhing darkness of the tunnels, Morgan knocked back two approaching Risen and shot the sword out of a charging Grimleal’s hand._

_He could hear the agonizing hesitation in every syllable as she whispered, “Morgan, please, we’ll—“_

_“Lucina! Come_ on! _” Severa shouted up ahead. Morgan sent her a silent prayer of thanks._

_Morgan gave his sister one last grin before he fired upon the tunnel’s ceiling, prompting Yarne to shriek something up ahead about a cave-in._

_Exactly._

_“Morgan!”_

_Lucina’s voice wasn’t the only one he heard. A veritable chorus sounded from behind, but it didn’t matter. They would be safe._

_A tactician knew when it was time to fold._

_Calling out a challenge even as rocks and debris began falling down around him and their pursuers, Morgan raised his hand high._

_“Hope will never die!”_

“So, is it possible for someone to get to see the Exalt?”

The groundskeeper braced both palms against his lower back and _pushed_ until his bones cricked. “Eh? Well sure, I s’ppose so. She’s not exactly all high and mighty and cagey about meetin’ her subjects. She comes out to talk to us ‘round town all the time. If you hang about long enough, I’m sure you’ll see her.”

“Hmm, all right, thanks!” Bending down, Morgan started assisting him in pushing some fragments of stone aside—remnants of a statue to Chrom, brutally broken down in the previous Grimleal assault. “I just want to thank her personally, you know?”

“You ‘n’ me both. I never got the guts to approach her, but once she came over ‘n’ shook my hand, thankin’ me for my work…bless her heart, is what I’m sayin’.”

After a moment, the groundskeeper squinted at him, prompting Morgan to hold his breath.

“…Say, you look an awful lot like her. Who’re you again?”

“I’m just a village kid,” Morgan laughed, and he wondered when lying became so easy; if he didn’t think too hard about it, the words flowed as naturally as water.

“Ah, well, I’ll let you have your privacy, seein’ as you’re helpin’ me out ‘n’ such. Mind goin’ to fetch a lantern from that shed over there? It’s startin’ to get dark.”

Lanterns in the dark. Morgan did as he was instructed, collecting some oil and grabbing the iron ring of a lamp tinted off-gray with soot.

Lanterns in the dark.

_Waking up seemed more like a dream than his actual dream. He should have been dead—or, at the very least, aching all over—but he found there was little and less wrong with him besides a strange shortness of breath._

_…Ah. He was nervous._

_Morgan frantically looked around for his book, but couldn’t find it anywhere in the empty cell. There was nothing about besides the cot he’d woken up on. Even the iron door seemed unworthy of his attention at the moment._

_He’d lost her book._

_It was a shame. He’d hoped he could be buried with it._

_Captured by Plegian forces, Morgan knew he would soon be wishing for death. He sat down on the cot and closed his eyes, rubbing his arms in a futile attempt to both warm himself and calm down; the eyes of Grima on his sleeves seemed to be mocking him. Watching him. Judging._

_The door opened, and his mother came in._

_“Were you looking for this?” she asked, holding his book toward him. It was only slightly scuffed, and_ that _was a miracle he frankly didn’t deserve._

_His hand hovered awkwardly between his chest and the offered tome, his eyes unable to leave her face._

_“M-Mother…?!”_

_They said she had died. Perished right along with Father._

_“Morgan?” she replied with a faint, amused smile that he would only realize later simply didn’t belong._

A nearby inn had been restored to working order, and Morgan secured himself a room for the night after he assisted the chef earlier that evening in taking and arranging orders. He’d quickly proven himself a whiz at calculating prices, payments, and who got what in a certain amount of time, and the establishment was only too happy to take him on.

It was becoming…frightening. The ease with which everybody was willing to accept him back into their lives. This was a time of great benevolence and hope for the halidom, and he supposed it wasn’t _too_ terribly shocking, in a sense; everybody wanted a helping hand, and everybody had a void they yearned to fill.

Maybe his other self had been right. Maybe he should just start over. Become a baker’s son, a groundskeeper, a shepherd who looked out at fields turning green with envy of the sky’s brilliance. Leave Lucina and their friends to their hard-won victory.

He had, after all, betrayed them. He had no right to return to them now. Even when Lucina struck down Grima with Falchion in hand, he had not been there.

Putting aside the journal he’d brought with him, Morgan stared out the window at the torchlights dotting the capital’s nighttime streets.

When had he stopped blazing against the dark, exactly?

_It had all begun with a sensation like drowning._

_She was Robin—his mother—and yet…not._

_She was no more his mother than a painting was its subject. She was all sharp edges and still colors, missing his mother’s vibrant wit and warm concern. Yet she filled that part of him that was longing for satisfaction, and there was—_

_There was a darkness._

_A sense of familiarity in those bleak halls that left him with no choice but to pursue her, to follow. If he could just_ find _the source of the nostalgia, if he could just extricate it from these choking shadows, then surely…_

**_WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN ONE AND THE SAME._ **

_So it said._

_But Morgan would not accept it. So he chased, and he chased, and he plunged so deep into the darkness that he ran the risk of never knowing of the light again._

_They were not one and the same._

_If only he could find her, and prove it._

“G-Good morning, Your Highness! Would you care for a cinnamon roll? Fresh out of the oven!”

“No, no, try one of my bagels! Raisins are a thousand times healthier, you know!”

“Thank you, but perhaps in a moment. I just wanted to check in and see how the recovery efforts were proceeding. Has anyone seen the foreman…?”

Now was his chance. As good a time as any, he supposed.

Morgan knew that all of the right variables were lined up, and that this strategy was sound enough to act upon. Regardless, he was finding it unexpectedly…difficult, to walk out the doorway of the inn. He lingered there uncertainly as he watched her stride amongst the populace, each civilian more eager than the last to speak with her. She was tall and regal and humble and every bit the Exalt he had always known she would be.

It was through a haze of light and shadow, of right and wrong, of the past and the future and every second of the present that lay between, that he approached her at last.

Laurent was nearby, and his eyes widened behind his spectacles as he noted his approach. Something about Morgan’s gaze must have sparked something in him, because he stayed surprisingly, conspicuously, silent as Morgan walked straight up to his sister, and—

“L-Lucina?”

She turned, and whatever greeting she’d had upon her lips died on the spot. Several moments later. Then:

“M-Morgan…!”

He didn’t know what to expect. Time seemed to stretch on indefinitely as they stared at one another in silence. The crowds went quiet.

Mostly.

“D-Did she say _Morgan?_ As in, the lost prince?” whispered one goodwife, a bit too loudly.

A veritable deluge of conversation began after that, but Lucina remained still. She only moved after a few seconds had passed, and that was simply so she could cross the space between them and crush him to her in a hug that reminded him of why the darkness would never prevail against a light such as this.

“I-I’m back,” he chuckled weakly, returning her embrace with some trepidation.

Lucina shook her head, and he knew she was crying, heard the cracks of it shooting through her voice, but when he looked at her…

She was smiling radiantly.

“Welcome home,” she said.

_“Aren’t I supposed to have a Brand?” Morgan wondered aloud as he followed his father through the streets of Ylisstol._

_“It depends. Sometimes you’re born with it immediately visible, like you’re sister. Other times, it’s simply not in a noticeable place, like your aunt. I wouldn’t worry about it right now.”_

_Chrom had a lot on his mind these days. Morgan tailed him around a corner and up a flight of stone steps, looking out over the forests and plains that made up the bulk of Ylisse’s livelihood._

_“Did you have fun with your mother earlier?”_

_“Yeah! I really love playing those games with her! She beats me all the time, though…”_

_Chuckling, Chrom took Morgan into his arms and carried him on his shoulders. “Your mother tends to beat_ everybody _in games of skill like that. It’s what makes her…well, your mother.”_

_“Of course! Mother’s the best there is!” He puffed his chest out as though any compliments sent her way were really for him. “You teach Lucina a lot of stuff too though, right? What kinda stuff do you teach her?”_

_“Hmm. Well, I was going to tell you this anyway,” Chrom said, smiling up at his son. “If there’s only one thing you take to heart from me when you get older, I want it to be this.”_

_Morgan tilted his head, curious._

_“Hope will never die.”_

And he knew this to be true—felt it for himself in the returning health of the grass, heard it in the lively words of the townsfolk, and witnessed it in the valiance of his sister and their friends.

_Hope will never die._

_And as Grima fell, Morgan remembered._

**Author's Note:**

> 1) i'm so sorry for typos because i wrote this in about two hours between 2:30am to 4:30am  
> 2) i love morgan and it only took me literally YEARS to write a fic on him.  
> 3) i actually like female morgan a bit more, but for this story, i feel like it was better that i did this perspective  
> i hope you liked it as much as i liked writing it B)


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